“... his image, his name and his character – modest, dedicated, optimistic – were recruited in the service of British and American big science, as the inventor of the transformer, the dynamo and the electric motor, those icons of modernity. His reputation survived more than a decade as Margaret Thatcher’s favourite scientist: between 1982 and 1996 Matthew ...”

“... and so many like it was the wartime British naval blockade of Germany. And behind the policy, Lord Robert Cecil, the maverick son of the late Victorian Conservative prime minister Lord Salisbury, and minister for blockade in Lloyd George’s wartime government. The aim of the blockade was to damage Germany’s war effort but not Britain’s relations with ...”

“... A senior official told Scahill that Obama was ‘surprised and upset and wanted an explanation’. Robert Gibbs, a senior advisor to Obama, suggested that the boy wouldn’t have been killed if he’d had a ‘more responsible father’. A wrongful death suit against US officials for the death of both al-Awlakis and a third US citizen is pending. Scahill ...”

“... again as a world power. Henry Stimson, Roosevelt’s war secretary, took a different view. So did Robert Jackson, a Supreme Court justice, though Jackson was clear that ‘you must put no man on trial under forms of a judicial proceeding if you are not willing to see him freed if not proven guilty … the world yields no respect for courts that are organised ...”

“... and decided they were suitable as a kind of non-commissioned officer class in the police, postal service and other arms of the state. As a useful if inferior race, they should be protected, unlike the Herero and the Nama. The law, however, followed Trotha’s belief that Africans were subhuman and his almost pathological fear that racial mixing would spread ...”

“... ranks of his own party’s beleaguered moderates, an apostate because of his endorsement of gay service in the military, abortion rights and even the legalisation of marijuana for medical purposes. The New Right had moved way past its founding father. Goldwater was a man before his time, but barely. He was trounced in the 1964 election, going down to one of ...”

“... rule. Vansittart thought that he viewed events ‘with the detachment of a choirboy at a funeral service’. Almost alone among politicians, he was indifferent to what his colleagues, the public or posterity thought of him or his policies. He kept no diary, made no attempt to preserve his papers. His sloth was legendary too. He seldom appeared before 11 ...”

“... artisans, or Dissenters, or women, or colonial subjects aspiring to places in the Indian Civil Service. I don’t remember the Scots or the Welsh or the Irish being mentioned in this catalogue of the excluded. Uncomfortable with any nationalism except its own, this English critique of English still seemed to assume that literature in Britain meant ...”

“... mother, Beth McBride, came from a family of miners and labourers; she escaped from domestic service into the ‘as near as dammit white-collar embrace of Scottish Motor Transport’, as a clippie on the buses. Her father, Eddie Galloway, was a little grander, from a family that ‘could boast a glove-maker, a chauffeur, two cart-drivers and a chap who ...”

“... office, came out so swiftly and in such polished form that the constitutional historian Robert Stevens has speculated that they must have been in preparation before the changes were announced. No doubt there is always an advantage to government in starting a process of consultation and reform with some of the major facts already accomplished; but if ...”

“... meticulous. At one end of the spectrum lurk the sex murderers in The Comfort of Strangers (1981), Robert and Caroline, whose actions lead their victim’s girlfriend to surmise that ‘the imagination, the sexual imagination’, embodies ‘a powerful single organising principle’ which distorts ‘all relations, all truth’. The incestuous children in The ...”

“... well. Honigmann argues that Shakeshafte was Shakespeare, and that he might have passed from the service of Hesketh into the household of Henry Stanley, Earl of Derby. There he might have met the core of the theatrical company which was to become the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. There is at present a large industry surrounding this line of inquiry, and it goes ...”

“... of this kind was the conviction that Pound had undergone a fundamental change of heart in Pisa. Robert Fitzgerald, reviewing the Pisan Cantos in the New Republic in August 1948, was glad to find the poet ‘for the first time expressing a personal desolation and a kind of repentance’. The trick was to imagine a desolation so extreme that, whatever Pound ...”

“... to secure a favourable settlement from the Commissioners for Compounding, he later gave valuable service to the Stuarts in exile and was rewarded at the Restoration with the lucrative post of Treasurer to the household of the Duke of York. At one stage he was actively involved in the suppression of conventicles. Though it is not impossible that ...”

“... over a new winter of discontent, with the Government’s management of everything from the health service and cattle disease to public transport under fierce popular scrutiny. John Prescott, with his two Jaguars and his immense self-satisfaction, became an obvious target for embittered travellers, but the gross strategic error was the failure to make ...”